Although several scholars have expanded their selection criteria when editing anthologies of Latinx literature, they rarely include writings by colonial Creoles. Focusing on Francisco de Florencia (1620–1695), this chapter argues that his 1694 provincial chronicle of the Jesuits in New Spain deserves to be studied with other colonial texts that have been described as “symbolic precursors” to Latinx writings. Unlike other Spanish explorers and missionaries who traveled to the Spanish Borderlands, Florencia was born there; his hometown was Saint Augustine, he lived most of his life in Mexico City, and he spent almost a decade in southern Europe representing his religious province. Florencia’s frontier crossings offer early modern examples of border crossings, themes that emerge in the ways he deals with transnational experiences and influences, questions of belonging, and a sense of space. Even though sacred (or ecclesiastical) history is often overlooked in studies of Latinx literature, an analysis of the ways in which Florencia engages with earlier Spanish accounts of the Jesuit missions in La Florida is a unique window onto Creole identities in the early modern Spanish world.

This is the only work that survives by Socrates Scholasticus, a figure traditionally believed to be a lawyer, despite no evidence indicating as much. His Ecclesiastical History was likely written late in the reign of Theodosius II, covering the period from Emperor Constantine to Emperor Theodosius II (from 305 to 439). Like his fellow fifth-century historians Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Sozomen, Socrates, who likely wrote his work before they wrote theirs, picks up his narrative of church history where Eusebius of Caesarea left off in his Ecclesiastical History and tracks the activity of bishops, priests, monks, emperors, imperial officials, and military figures as they operate within the then-new cultural matrix of an imperialized Christianity. He draws on the original writings of many of his subjects and incorporates material from Eusebius of Caesarea’s Life of Constantine, Rufinus of Aquileia’s Ecclesiastical History, and the lost work of Gelasius of Caesarea, among other sources. While Socrates avoids the triumphalist tone that defined the writings of his predecessor Eusebius, he nevertheless uses his work to argue that the world benefits from a strong relationship between Christian worship and state power.

Flodoard’s The Triumphs of Christ, an epic history of Christianity narrated in almost 20,000 lines of hexameter, is one of the longest and most remarkable poems to have survived from the early Middle Ages. It has been highly neglected by both historians and literary scholars, however, who have tended to look upon it as a simple compilation and versification of earlier Christian historiography and hagiography. The fundamental argument of this chapter is that this characterisation is unjust, and that the Triumphs is in fact a work of considerable innovation that sheds light on education, literary culture and intellectual life in the tenth century. An examination of the structure, content and sources of the poem demonstrates that Flodoard conceived the poem as a continuation of the biblical epics of late antiquity. I then explore the implications of this for why Flodoard composed the work and what it reveals about his notions of history and history-writing. By using the Triumphs as a window onto Flodoard’s intellectual activities and networks, I suggest that the early tenth-century Latin West was not the literary desert it is often portrayed as.